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Friday, February 26, 2016

Copper and Stardust

Photoshopped by me. Image source credit to NASA ([x] and [x]). The image of the stars is titled "Chaos at the Heart of Orion," which is an absolutely gorgeous title that I might use in a story someday.

Newer readers will remember A Winter's Ball, the first and currently only excerpt from a novel I am working on (read: doing everything but writing). This is a bit of world-building for that novel, exploring the Kevaryese culture's belief in how the universe came to be.

I have always loved world mythology, and particularly creation myths. It always surprises me how similar these ancient cultures' stories are in their imagery, even when many of the cultures had no way of interacting with each other. This myth doesn't have a Creator figure, but rather is centered around the idea that the world came from a union of sky and earth, as the Egyptians and the Ancient Greeks both believed, and the interaction between the darkness and the sun's light mirrors the Chinese concept of ying and yang. However, I like to think I added some unique elements to this story. I'll leave you to figure those out for yourselves.

So, without further ado...

Copper and Stardust:

A Kevaryese Creation Myth

In
the days before words, amidst a vast darkness, there was only the
Sun. Its light raced across the void, leaping from place to place and
laughing, until one day the light fell upon a great stone at the edge
of the darkness. When the light touched the stone, it gilded over its
rocky surface to make it smooth, but this angered the darkness, for
the gold reflected the Sun's light so brightly that there was no
corner of the universe unlit, and thus nowhere for the darkness to
live. So the darkness made itself into a hammer and beat the stone,
shattering its metal surface into a thousand pieces. Then it hurled
those pieces back toward the Sun. Barely larger than pinpricks, these
specks of gold shone brightly, but were cast so far apart from one
another that very little light stayed in them for long. When words
came, and people, we would call these stars,
meaning lonely
ones,
as they drift across the sky in search of companionship.

When
the Sun's light found the stone again, it smoothed it over in silver.
This too reflected the light and drew the darkness's enmity. The
darkness made itself into a chisel and, as if to sculpt the orb into
a fine statue, cut away the silver from its surface, rolled it into a
small ball, and swallowed it. For some time there was no light. But
soon the silver ball began to glow from inside the darkness's belly.
The darkness suppressed the glow—it could do such things, for it
was darkness—but each time it did so, the flow would return in full
force in a little while. When words came, and people, we would call
this moon,
meaning resilient
one,
ever waxing and waning as it struggles against the darkness.

When
the Sun's light found the stone a third time, it smoothed it over in
copper. The darkness made itself into a pestle, and ground the copper
into dust, but since little of it shone, the darkness left it on the
stone's surface. Instead of shining, the copper turned the Sun's
light into heat. Some of the copper melted into water and formed
oceans. Some of the copper became old and grew a green patina of
vegetation, and still more melted into strange, misshapen forms which
soon came to move all over the earth. When words came, and people, we
would call this life,
meaning copper's
gift,
for without this copper we would be cursed to roam a barren earth.

For
some time, the animals roamed the earth thoughtless, nameless,
wordless. But one day a star fell from the sky onto the moon, and
from the moon onto the earth, and there mingled with the copper in
the soil. When the Sun's light shone upon this new mixture, it melted
into new forms, six of them, that were unlike any of the animals'.
The copper gave each one the blessing of life, and, because they were
made of stardust and moondust as well as copper, these new creatures
kept some of the Sun's light within them, which gave them speech,
meaning the power
to create through words.